Freedom of the Press in Cuba from 2002-2013: Voices of Post-Revolutionary Exiled Cuban Journalists, Writers and Dissidents in the U.S.

The role of media in any society is determined by the level of press freedom in that society. Freedom of the press can be best seen in the relationship between the government and mass media institutions. Since the end of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the Cuban regime has been criticized by organizations all over the world for allegedly limiting press freedom in the island. Despite the wide controversy, little is known about the state of freedom of the press in Cuban media in the last few years. This study set out to investigate the level of press freedom enjoyed in Cuba from the year 2002 to 2013 as well as any changes in policy in regards to this freedom in the same timeline. Through interviews with Cuban exiles living in the United States, it was concluded that there is a very limited amount of press freedom granted to mass media institutions. Additionally, it was concluded that no fundamental changes have been made to grant a higher level of press freedom

Wind turbine control design to enhance the fault ride-through capability

This paper presents a control strategy for wind turbines to enhance their fault ride-through capability. The controller design is based on pitch controlled variable speed wind turbine equipped with doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG). The fault ride-through is realized by injecting a crowbar with variable resistance on the generator rotor circuit. To reduce the mechanical loads induced by grid faults, the wind turbine controller is improved by means of filtering techniques which alleviate the loads on the turbine blades and drive-train. The performance of the control strategy is tested by simulation. It is shown that the combined mechanical and electrical controller design significantly improves the wind turbine fault ride-through capability

Orthogonalization of vectors with minimal adjustment

Two transformations are proposed that give orthogonal components with a one-to-one correspondence between the original vectors and the components. The aim is that each component should be close to the vector with which it is paired, orthogonality imposing a constraint. The transformations lead to a variety of new statistical methods, including a unified approach to the identification and diagnosis of collinearities, a method of setting prior weights for Bayesian model averaging, and a means of calculating an upper bound for a multivariate Chebychev inequality. One transformation has the property that duplicating a vector has no effect on the orthogonal components that correspond to nonduplicated vectors, and is determined using a new algorithm that also provides the decomposition of a positive-definite matrix in terms of a diagonal matrix and a correlation matrix. The algorithm is shown to converge to a global optimum

Environmental effects on the photophysics of organic-inorganic halide perovskites

The photophysical properties of films of organic-inorganic lead halide perovskites under different ambient conditions are herein reported. We demonstrate that their luminescent properties are determined by the interplay between photoinduced activation and darkening processes, which strongly depend on the atmosphere surrounding the samples. We have isolated oxygen and moisture as the key elements in each process, activation and darkening, both of which involve the interaction with photogenerated carriers. These findings show that environmental factors play a key role in the performance of lead halide perovskites as efficient luminescent materials.Peer Reviewe

Atributos para la conectividad urbana sustentable de espacios públicos en el área metropolitana de Guadalajara

El área metropolitana de Guadalajara ha incrementado su extensión territorial, su densidad y su población de manera desmesurada. Lo anterior causa principalmente una fragmentación espacial que ocasiona ineficiencia en la conectividad de los espacios públicos y abona a su subutilización. Esto promueve una falta de apropiación que rompe en el tejido social. Este proyecto tiene como objetivo encontrar atributos clave que contribuyan a la conectividad urbana sustentable de espacios públicos con la finalidad de generar corredores de conectividad que integren dichos espacios. Lo anterior se pretende lograr desde una perspectiva hermenéutica con una metodología mixta con base en información cualitativa y elementos cuantitativos que se reinterpretarán hermenéuticamente.Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologí

Reducing Unnecessary Alerts in Pedestrian Protection Systems Based on P2V Communications

There are different proposals in the literature on how to protect pedestrians using warning systems to alert drivers of their presence. They can be based on onboard perception systems or wireless communications. The evaluation of these systems has been focused on testing their ability to detect pedestrians. A problem that has received much less attention is the possibility of generating too many alerts in the warning systems. In this paper, we propose and analyze four different algorithms to take the decision on generating alerts in a warning system that is based on direct wireless communications between vehicles and pedestrians. With the algorithms, we explore different strategies to reduce unnecessary alerts. The feasibility of the implementation of the algorithms was evaluated with a deployment using real equipment, and tests were carried out to verify their behavior in real scenarios. The ability of each algorithm to reduce unnecessary alerts was evaluated with realistic simulations in an urban scenario, using a traffic simulator with vehicular and pedestrian flows. The results show the importance of tackling the problem of driver overload in warning systems, and that it is not straightforward to predict the load of alerts generated by an algorithm in a large-scale deployment, in which there are multiple interactions between vehicles and pedestrians